COllaborative Platform for trAnsmedia storytelling and cross channel distribution of EUROPEan sport events

Project Information

COPA EUROPE

Grant agreement ID: 957059

DOI

10.3030/957059

Project closed

EC signature date 29 July 2020

Start date 1 November 2020

End date 31 October 2023

Funded under

• INDUSTRIAL LEADERSHIP - Leadership in enabling and industrial technologies - Information and Communication Technologies (ICT)

Total cost

€ 6 207 098,75

EU contribution

€ 4 904 355,88

Coordinated by

WORLDLINE IBERIA SA
Spain

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - COPA EUROPE (COllaborative Platform for trAnsmedia storytelling and cross channel distribution of EUROPEan sport events)

Reporting period: 2022-05-01 to 2023-10-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

COPA EUROPE addresses the exploding demand for non-linear, more engaging sports content consumption, globally and without borders by leveraging Over-The-Top and combining it with new set of media technologies that democratises the consumer experience, enable cost-sensitive live video from anywhere, and personalize the distribution to change the experience of each viewer individually.

The following objectives are set for the COPA EUROPE project:
Objective O1: Design a decentralized E2E platform for sports media channel federation, enrichment and broadcasting
Objective O2: Implement the infrastructure needed to allow content creators and producers of live coverage to react in an adaptable and flexible way to live sports outcomes
Objective O3: Disrupt the OTT sports media services market with unprecedented flexibility of purchasing and subscription management options
Objective O4: Produce higher quality services that respect users’ personal data and privacy by capitalizing on data network effects through federated learning (FL)
Objective O5: Implement content adaptation and Quality of Experience for interactive high quality media delivery
Objective O6: Develop and pilot alternative platforms for broadcasting the content, connecting fans with detailed, real-time information
Objective O7: Validate the COPA EUROPE vision through solid, real-life use cases and public, live demonstrators
Objective O8: Implement impact-driven dissemination, standardisation and exploitation

During this final period the project has continued performing as expected, with all COPA EUROPE partners deeply committed, as demonstrated by the timely delivery of documents with a very high level of quality, following all established quality and reporting procedures. In summary, the success of COPA EUROPE over the past three years is a result of the consortium excellent teamwork, partners strong commitment and shared goals, which has ultimately led us to all the new opportunities that the technologies developed in COPA EUROPE offer us.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

During this final period the project has continued performing as expected, with all COPA EUROPE partners deeply committed, as demonstrated by the timely delivery of documents with a very high level of quality, following all established quality and reporting procedures. Though the best demonstration of the excellent performance is the many and important achievements accomplished during the project, such as:
• Final version of the use case specification and project requirements
• Final version of the COPA EUROPE platform architecture
• Final version of all the COPA EUROPE components: Users’ applications, Core components, Middleware, Content management, Analytics, Processing components
• Integration framework and infrastructure
• Execution of the pilot trials for the 3 Use Cases and their evaluation
• Dissemination, standardisation and collaboration with NGM projects
• Final version of COPA EUROPE business models and exploitation plans

The joint exploitation strategy of the COPA EUROPE platform is designed to maximize the commercial potential of the identified exploitable assets and bundles of assets. The COPA EUROPE consortium seeks exploitation opportunities of its results in numerous domains, including the use of results in further research activities. The strategy involves the establishment of a governance structure that is light and flexible, allowing for quick decision-making and adaptation to changing market conditions. In order to maximise the project impact, the COPA EUROPE contact with the industry has been established through the Stakeholders’ Board. Also, exposure of COPA EUROPE has been achieved via the various dissemination tools including the website, social media, newsletters, webinars and conferences.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

COPA EUROPE had several ambitions to go beyond the state of the art in several areas:
- Data-driven, transmedia content production for emerging broadcasting properties (eSports)
COPA EUROPE translates raw match live coverage into transmedia audience-facing graphics and visual summarizations. These are incorporated as augmented graphical elements, as well as in secondary displays toward enriching the streaming content prior, during and after the conclusion of the broadcast with additional information, extracted from the data processing.
- Tokenization of digital assets with blockchain technology
COPA EUROPE defines a new non fungible token which represents media content and ownership. Moreover, it explores different aspects of the access rights to the token which allows to express notions such as copyrights, sharing of the tokens and minting to express royalty payment for token owners.
- Federated Learning for practical, real-life applications
The innovation in COPA EUROPE is on new FL schemes and compression algorithms, and on scalability and reliability. The activities on FL are integrated in standardization efforts of the MPEG group, which is currently working on new standards for compression of neural networks for multimedia content description and analysis, which also includes FL.
- High quality video compression and adaptive distribution
COPA EUROPE defines a video pivot format based upon one of the video standards and proposes it to standardisation as the internal format to be used for decentralized video streaming platforms.
- User perceived, subjective video quality assessment
The use of learning-driven Quality of Experience video sequence comparison metrics resulting from the use of Convolutional Neural Networks frameworks leads to alternative error metrics useful for processes such as video compression.

Based on the previous ambitions, COPA EUROPE has delivered a set of concrete and added value exploitable results:
ER1 System for predicting actions in esports video content
ER2 System for detecting actions in sport video content
ER3 Multi-format Video reception gateway
ER4 HLS streaming module
ER5 FL and Clustered FL for Recommender Systems
ER6 League of Legends tools for event acquisition and annotation
ER7 Esports data driven graphics production tool
ER8 Transmedia storytelling manager
ER9 XR viewing application
ER10 XR Studio
ER11 Blockchain services for the tokenization of media content
ER12 Marketplace Contents App
ER13 Portal to associate LiveU-generated live streams with Blockchain and manage them
ER14 Transmit over 5G
ER15 Media Asset Management System
ER16 Latent Semantic Indexing
ER17 QoE analysis
ER18 RTP to SRT streaming converter
ER19 Blockchain-based marketplace
ER20 Platform Analytics
ER21 Blockchain database
ER22 System for predicting actions in League of Legends

All these results have derived in several potential impacts:
- Strategic impact: Sports media rights policies and directives, Sports policy, Policy on Blockchain Technologies, Regulation and sport status of eSports in the EU.
- Economic impact: Relationship between traditional Media and Entertainment stakeholders and the emerging eSport industry, so as to drive growth that can place European companies in a leadership position globally, as superior innovators in both future broadcasting solutions and fan engagement.
- Societal impact: Enhance transmediality of (e)Sports participatory cultures. Furthermore, tools are developed to encourage voluntary participation in such communities, with emphasis placed on quality, productive contributions.

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